Liberation

Diaries 1970-1983

(Harper; 875 pages; $39.99)

When Christopher Isherwood died in 1986, he left behind a sizable body of work, including seven novels, five volumes of memoirs and travel journals, several books and numerous articles on Vedanta, a strain of Hindu philosophy, and three plays and some travel writing co-written with W.H. Auden.

But the gold mine of Isherwood work has been the posthumous publication of three huge diaries amounting to almost 3,000 pages. Comprehensively and lovingly edited and annotated by Katherine Bucknell, these volumes - the third of which, "Liberation: Diaries 1970-1983" has just been published - give us the most detailed portrait of a writer whose stock in trade as an intensely autobiographical novelist was to document his own life.

These diaries, beginning with "Diaries 1939-1960" in 1996 and continuing with "The Sixties: Diaries: 1960-1969" in 2010, are a memorial to a writer best remembered for "The Berlin Stories." The 1945 book, made up of the novellas "Goodbye to Berlin" and "Mr. Norris Changes Trains," was the basis for the 1951 Broadway hit "I Am a Camera," which became the musical "Cabaret" in 1966.

Tom Ford's 2009 film "A Single Man" was based on Isherwood's 1962 novel, but it generated more comments on director Tom Ford's artsy mise-en-scene than it did revitalize interest in Isherwood.

Isherwood's life was a cavalcade of 20th century political and social movements. Born in Britain in 1904, he rejected his upper-class background, never finished his degree at Cambridge, fled to 1930s Berlin in search of homosexual adventure, dabbled in left-wing politics and then - with Auden - moved to the United States in 1939. He worked in Hollywood, continued writing novels, became deeply committed to Vedanta, and, in the late 1960s, championed gay liberation. In 1953, at age 48, he fell in love with 18-year-old Don Bachardy, who became a prominent artist, and they remained together until Isherwood's death at age 81. Bachardy, now 78, still lives in Los Angeles.

Read together, these three diaries provide us with an ever-evolving, panoramic view of American culture since 1939. Isherwood is the consummate observer because he knew what it meant to be an outsider.

As a British expatriate, he embraced America for its egalitarianism, but as a mostly uncloseted gay man, he was set apart.

As a novelist, Isherwood was committed to dispassionately describing his world. As he wrote in "Goodbye to Berlin," "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." This fictional voice is distinct - the dispassionate tone in "A Single Man" is viscerally upsetting - but in the diaries, Isherwood is more involved, compulsively chatty and gossipy.

In the first volume, Isherwood establishes himself in America, makes friends with writers such as Gore Vidal, Truman Capote and Gavin Lambert, nurtures his relationship with Bachardy, moves into the L.A. social scene, experimenting with drugs and navigating the fringes of gay Hollywood.

Surprisingly, given his earlier political interests, he writes very little about U.S. politics. The second volume changes tone as Bachardy seeks more personal freedom and Isherwood - as the United States becomes his home - is increasingly critical of American society, using the morally judgmental tone of his writings about England and Germany in the 1930s.

"Liberation" displays Isherwood in his prime. As Isherwood turned 66 and marked more than 17 years with Bachardy, these entries are the work of a critical thinker and artist finally settled in his adopted country.

He and Bachardy are immersed in the crucible of the L.A. art scene and the intellectual side of Hollywood culture.

These last diaries display a clear shift from the past volumes as Isherwood makes clear his political views. He and Bachardy hear Tom Hayden speak against the war in Vietnam (Jane Fonda is there, "looking older, but still good") and he makes his opposition to the war clear in numerous entries. They also attend gay pride events and relish the new movement's openness as an expression of the increasing publicness of their own relationship.

Ironically, and inevitably, this openness about politics is accompanied by a detailing of failing health in large and small ways. Eyes, hands, throat and knees are all weakening as Isherwood ages.

It is as though the potential nearness of his death - almost a decade away - is animating the importance and sharpness of his observations.

On June 2, 1978, Isherwood writes, "I chatter away chirpily about death to interviewers and am aware that it isn't all quite real to me. But, oh my God, how thankful I am for my good spirits, so immensely increased by my angel and his life going on beside me."

By the end of 44 years of diary entries, it becomes clear that the theme here has always been the love between Isherwood and Bachardy, which eventually turns the novelist from an unblinking, mechanical camera into a open, vulnerable, fragile human.